Read the white paper, have a few questions. Would greatly appreciate if the team could clarify.
Section 2) Tnet) please further explain the need and role of Forwarding nodes.
Can wallet nodes directly communicate with Validator nodes?
Forwarding nodes help to balance the load. If you want to have a client that does not have a full ledger on its own, like a phone app, you need a service to consult for account information. This is equivalent to services like Blockchain.info in the Bitcoin world. We think that a full client is not the right solution for most users, so made this part of the protocol. This has the advantage that in the future, app users can freely configure which forwarding node to consult, because they are all using the same protocol.
tl;dr: In Bitcoin language, a forwarding node would be a full node (having full ledger copy) which is not mining (in our case voting).
Section 3.1) Sync) Is the ledger public or only shared by Validator nodes?
Do all the Validator nodes have a complete copy of the ledger?
Everybody can run validator and forwarding nodes, which have a full copy of the ledger.
Section 3.2) Deposits) If i'm an attacker with resources, is it possible to create multiple Validator nodes at the same time, wait 6 hours and then attack the system?
Yes. But you need a lot of resources, because validator nodes require deposit. It is analogous to buying a lot of mining hardware and overtake Bitcoin mining.
Section 3.3) Redeem) Would this result in the formation of independent clusters of Validator nodes or a network where all the nodes are not directly connected but are connected at different levels to each other? Kind of like six degrees of Kevin (
https://oracleofbacon.org/)
Random here does not mean “connect to any node”, but select nodes in a mathematically random way from the full list of nodes. The full list of nodes is literally public, because deposit accounts are listed in the ledger.
If anything remains unclear, feel free to ask more specific questions. Note that the project is under active development and more detailed documentation will be released over time, of course.
